live blog
Israel’s army says it has killed numerous gunmen in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours. Austria is also stopping its payments to the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees. The developments in the live blog.
The New York Times has reported previously unknown details about the alleged involvement of employees of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees in the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th. A UNRWA employee was involved in the kidnapping of a woman from Israel, another was distributing ammunition, and a third was involved in a massacre in a kibbutz in which 97 people died, the newspaper reported on Sunday, citing a corresponding Israeli report Dossier that is available to the US government.
Accordingly, the allegations are based on information from the Israeli secret service. Among other things, he traced the movements of six UNRWA employees within Israel on October 7th using their phones. Others had telephone conversations monitored in which they discussed their involvement in the Hamas attack. One person was asked by text message to bring rocket-propelled grenades that had been stored in his house. There is currently no confirmation of the allegations by the US government, wrote the New York Times. But Washington considers them credible.
The serious allegations against twelve of several thousand UNRWA employees caused outrage worldwide. After Israel provided the aid organization with relevant information, numerous Western countries temporarily stopped their payments to the aid organization, including the USA, Germany, Great Britain and France.
What is UNRWA?
The United Nations founded UNRWA in 1949 to help Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 and their descendants are entitled to their services. According to the organization, there are now around 5.9 million people. UNRWA has more than 30,000 employees, most of them Palestinian. The aid organization employs around 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip alone. It also operates in Jordan and Lebanon, among other countries.
The organization provides basic services such as education and healthcare to Palestinian refugees. Since the beginning of the Gaza war, it has also provided shelter for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and provided humanitarian aid.
Calls for Israeli repopulation of the Gaza Strip by government ministers at a conference in Jerusalem have been strongly condemned by the Palestinian side. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry in Ramallah spoke of a “meeting of colonialist terrorist organizations.”
Ministers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing conservative ruling party Likud were also represented at a settler-friendly conference in Jerusalem on Sunday evening. However, Netanyahu himself had described plans to repopulate the Gaza Strip after the war as unrealistic. At the “Victory Conference”, the right-wing extremist Police Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for Israeli settlers to return to the coastal strip and towns in the northern West Bank and to “encourage an exodus (of Palestinians)”. Only this could prevent another massacre like the one on October 7th, he argued.
“This meeting and its agenda once again reveal the true face of the right-wing Israeli ruling coalition,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The government rejects peace agreements and instead insists on “the occupation, colonialism and the apartheid regime.” Netanyahu’s government is seen as directly responsible for “such inflammatory calls,” it said. The international community and the USA are called upon to put pressure on Netanyahu so that the head of government stops this form of incitement.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and evacuated more than 20 Israeli settlements. In 2007, the Islamist Hamas seized sole control of the Mediterranean coastal area after a bloody battle with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah organization.
Following other states such as the USA and Germany, Austria is also suspending funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (UNRWA). The Austrian Foreign Ministry said the payments would be suspended in coordination with international partners until the allegations that the organization’s employees were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel have been fully clarified. “We call on UNRWA and the United Nations to conduct a comprehensive, rapid and complete investigation into the allegations,” the ministry said in a statement. Possible participants in the attack must be held accountable.
According to the military, Israeli troops have killed numerous armed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours. Four of them had prepared an ambush near the Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis. Israel accuses the radical Islamic Hamas of, among other things, barricading itself around hospitals and using civilians as human shields. Hamas rejects this.
Conflict parties as a source
In the current situation, information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by the Palestinian and Israeli conflict parties cannot be directly verified by an independent body.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations has said the government in Tehran was not involved in the attack on three US soldiers in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border.
These accusations were made with the political aim of “reversing the realities in the region,” the state news agency Irna quoted foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani as saying.
After the deadly attack on US soldiers in Jordan, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron called on Iran to de-escalate. “We strongly condemn the attacks on US forces by Iran-aligned militias. We continue to urge Iran to de-escalate the situation in the region,” Cameron wrote on the X platform that night.
Following other states such as the USA and Germany, Japan is also suspending funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (UNRWA).
The government in Tokyo is “extremely concerned about the alleged involvement of UNRWA employees in the terrorist attack against Israel” and has “strongly called on UNRWA to carry out the investigation promptly and fully,” the Foreign Ministry said. According to UNRWA, Japan is the aid agency’s sixth largest donor.
In Jerusalem on Sunday, thousands of people gathered at a convention center to demand the return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip. Among those attending the conference were 12 ministers from Netanyahu’s Likud party, as well as Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – both from the far-right parties in the ruling coalition.
It is time to promote the voluntary emigration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, said Ben Gvir. “If we don’t want another October 7th, we have to control the area,” he emphasized, referring to the major attack on Israel by Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip, almost four months ago.
Several participants in the rally carried weapons, while T-shirts reading “Gaza is part of Israel” were sold outside the convention center. In the hall, speakers emphasized that the return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip is the only way to ensure security for the people of Israel.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described the return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip as “not a realistic goal”. He also rejects an independent Palestinian state.
The new Hessian European Minister Manfred Pentz has called on the European Union to take serious consequences from the terror scandal at the UN aid agency UNRWA. “It would make the most sense if the aid organization were to be dissolved completely and the work was subordinated to the other UN aid organizations. Until then, the EU should also freeze its payments,” said the CDU politician to “Bild”.
If employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine were actually actively involved in the terrorist attack against Israel, this would be unforgivable, said Pentz. “If humanitarian aid becomes a Trojan horse for terrorism, then the EU must act. Looking the other way and continuing to finance it with understanding is not a strategy, but naive at best. It is not about stopping humanitarian aid, but about ensuring that it benefits those in need and not the terrorists.”
From the Israeli Prime Minister’s point of view, the talks in Paris about a new agreement with Hamas are constructive. Israel has declared the Kerem Shalom border crossing a restricted military area. All developments to read.